As 2015 gets ever closer, the overall plans for the yearlong celebration of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition centennial remain vague.

But whatever Balboa Park Celebration Inc., the organization charged with masterminding the centennial celebration, ultimately comes up with, James Kidrick, president and CEO of Balboa Park’s Air & Space Museum, is certain of one thing:

“When somebody says, ‘Air & Space Museum, are you ready?’ We’re ready,” he said. “Front and center. We’re going to uphold our end of the deal.”

Like the museum he leads — which, given San Diego’s rich aviation history, has a special place in the community — the outspoken Kidrick is unique among museum directors.

He served as a Navy fighter pilot for 21 years, and his résumé also includes stints with Thunderboats Unlimited and the Titan Corp. (a defense contractor). When he took over the Air & Space Museum in 2007, becoming its third director in two years, some board members and staffers left the then-troubled institution in response to his appointment.

Under his leadership, however, the institution has regained its footing. Its finances have stabilized, attendance has increased, and the museum has secured the Smithsonian Institution exhibit “Math Alive! — 2theXtreme” for 2015.

BALBOA PARK CENTENNIAL

Profiles of Balboa Park and its top museums, in advance of the park's 2015 anniversary.

“This exhibit is scary good,” Kidrick said. “This may be the most innovative exhibit of any exhibit you’ll see in the park in 2015.”

Numerous Balboa Park institutions that also have ambitious plans — including the Fleet Science Center, the San Diego Natural History Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Mingei International Museum and the Museum of Man — would take issue with that statement. But that doesn’t bother Kidrick.

What bothers him are outsiders who toy with the park, from preservationists to politicians. And with the attention garnered by the 2015 centennial, a lot of people have proposed using the park as their sandbox.

“I think our biggest fear is people who don’t live and work here, who don’t have skin in the game, dabbling with the park,” Kidrick said. “We’re all in. I mean, all in. If they make a misstep — say we’re going to close the (Cabrillo) bridge on weekends (as the former mayor was prepared to do), or we’re going to close it altogether (as has been repeatedly suggested); if that’s a misstep, and it’s a six-month misstep, there are some (organizations) that will go out of business; they are that fragile.”

Program choices

That may be an exaggeration, but not by much. When Kidrick joined the museum, it was one of those institutions. It was running a deficit of roughly a half-million dollars, an amount that was nearly a quarter of the museum’s operating budget. It’s hardly surprising Kidrick looked for ways of bringing people through the doors with exhibitions like “Gangsters, Glamour and Glory: Forging America’s Future in the 1930s,” which the museum presented in 2008, the year after he arrived.

“When we came up with that, it was to get people to see an airplane we had built from scratch,” Kidrick said. “We don’t just restore here; we can actually build. And that’s what we did with the Gee Bee (the Granville Gee Bee Super Sportster R-1).